2 February 2015

We have said, while discussing Machiavelli, that communism does not
discard the past, but grows out of it. This week the main item is Lenin’s “Three Sources and
Three Component Parts of Marxism” (download linked below). This piece
of writing, though extremely short, manages to embrace the whole of philosophy,
politics and economics. For these reasons it is highly popular with teachers
and students.

Lenin’s purpose is to show how comprehensive Marxism is, and that
Marxism is on the “highroad of development of world civilisation”.

He puts the matter like this:

“…there is nothing resembling "sectarianism"
in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a
doctrine which arose away from the highroad of development of world
civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in the
fact that he furnished answers to questions which had already engrossed the
foremost minds of humanity. His teachings arose as a direct and immediate
continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy,
political economy and socialism.”

One may appreciate Lenin’s point, without necessarily accepting every
simplicity in this highly compressed account. It is a scheme of understanding,
almost like a diagram. It raises many questions, for example:

·Is there any such thing as “Marxism”, in the sense
described here by Lenin as “complete and harmonious” and “an integral world
conception”? Karl Marx did not think so. From his own point of view, Marx had only
completed a small part of what lay before him; and he refused the label
“Marxist”.

·In what sense was Marx’s philosophy materialist? Did
Marx see human beings first and foremost as arrangements of molecules – i.e. as
an “extension” of material? Or is the actual point of Marx’s philosophy and
politics to give the free human subject priority over the material, objective
world in which it must toil for its development? Scholars still debate these
questions.

·In what sense did Marx have an economic doctrine, or
an economic theory? It is true that the question of surplus value is at the
core of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1. But is that work therefore an economic
text-book? Or is it really what Marx called it: A Critique of Political
Economy? In other words, is it not anti-economics, rather than economics?

When it comes to politics, there is no doubt about “the struggle of classes as the basis and the motive force of the whole
development”, as Lenin puts it. So there is a lot that is good in the
“Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”. But it is only a start
and it does not absolve anyone from the necessity of further study.

It is pleasing that in this short, packed piece Lenin still has time to
mention South Africa (in his last paragraph), and that news of proletarian
organisation in our country had already reached Lenin over a century ago, in
1913.